5 Big Discoveries About Personal Effectiveness in 2012

The science of self-improvement never ceases. Every year brings dozens of new quirky findings about how to be more effective, whether in managing our time, being more creative or just getting things done. Here are some of the highlights for me from 2012.

In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Wilson talks a lot about the adaptive unconscious. He tells us that much of what we do lives in the unconscious and therefore we cannot detect it ourselves. Things like what we think, feel, and want become unnoticeable. Now of course, if you’ve ever practiced mindfulness, or have ever self-reflected, some of the unnoticed start to surface and we gain insights, but more often than not, a lot of information goes unnoticed.

This is why one might have a hard time understanding why things go wrong. Given that we aren’t completely conscious of what we were doing, we tend to blame others for our mistakes. In order to gain better insight into ourselves, we need help getting the right answers. It turns out that other people's assessment of your personality predicts your behavior better than your own assessment would. So instead of thinking you already know everything about yourself, stop for a minute, and ask someone else.

Creswell explored what happens in the brain when people tackle problems that are too big for their conscious mind to solve. He made three groups of people think about purchasing an imaginary car based on multiple wants and needs. One group had to choose immediately—this group didn’t do so well at optimizing their decision. The second group had time to try to consciously pick the best car— yet their choices weren’t much better. The last group was given the task, then given a distracter task—something that didn’t require lots of mental energy, but still held their conscious attention, allowing for their non-conscious to keep working on the problem. Results showed this group did significantly better than the others at optimizing their decision.

FMRI scans also showed something interesting happening with the third group. According to Creswell, the brain regions that were active during the initial learning of the problem, continued to be active (we call this unconsciousneural reactivation) even while the brain was distracted with another task.

In short, when trying to solve a complex task, people who were distracted after first tackling the problem did better than people who put in conscious effort. (More information can be found in my previous blog.)

To test this, professors Evan Polman and Kyle Emich presented 137 undergraduates with this riddle: “A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long enough to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?”

Half the participants were asked to imagine themselves as the prisoner locked inside the tower (we’ll call them the “prisoner group”) and the other half were asked to imagine someone else trapped in the prison (“imaginary group”). In the prisoner group, 48% of participants solved the riddle, but in the imaginary group, 66% were able to solve the riddle. In a second experiment, the same professors asked participants to draw an alien that someone else might use to write about in a short story. In a third, participants had to come up with gift ideas for themselves, someone close to them, and someone they barely knew.

In the results across all three experiments, Polman and Emich found that participants were more creative or had better solutions when thinking for someone else. This is an intriguing finding with many implications and applications for creative problem solving. Just try to imagine someone else coming up with good ideas for using this finding…

There is no need to take a break if you’re on a roll though, Trougakos advises. For some people, working over an extended period can be revitalizing—you get into a zone. It is only when you’re forcing yourself to go on that you should stop.

Notre Dame Psychologist Jessica Payne and colleagues studied 207 students who habitually slept for at least six hours per night. Payne randomly gave each student information to study at either 9am, or 9pm, allowing for the 9am team to be awake for the rest of the day, while the 9pm, went to sleep. She tested these students on their recall after 30 minutes, 12 hours, and 24 hours. She found that after 12 hours, those students who slept shortly after studying had a better overall memory. After 24 hours, when both teams were well-rested, all students had superior memory recall.

"Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory” Payne says. In a world where we believe to be more successful you have to work longer hours, perhaps its time for a change, or even time for a break. Jessica will be presenting these and other findings at the 2013 NeuroLeadership Summits.

5. Optimize your peak time

What if you aligned everything in your schedule according to your body’s biological clock? New research is showing there’s a peak time for all activities, from when you should think critically to the best time for a tweet.

If you get paid to think critically, try to get most of your work done in the late morning, right after a warm shower. This will motivate your body’s clock by raising its temperature and preparing your working memory, alertness and concentration for getting things done. Anytime before noon is the best for when it comes to focusing because the afternoon (12pm-4pm) is prime time for distractions according to recent research led by Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. (Tips on how to manage these distractions can be found in my previous blog.)

If you get paid to think creativity, most adults perform their best right as they begin to slump in terms of wakefulness. Martin Moore-Ede, chairman and chief executive of Circadian, a training and consulting firm, says at around 2pm, sleepiness tends to peak. This can boost creativity. When you’re fatigued, your mind can’t stay focused and you drift in and out of all these different avenues in your mind, which allows for you to free associate and be open to new ideas.

In summary, it turns out that if you want to be most effective, letting go of the need for your own conscious mind to do all the problem solving might be the key. Let your unconscious do more work, whether through napping or distractions, and try seeing things through the eyes of others. Finally, quite counter-intuitively, perhaps others know more about us than we do ourselves. Happy holidays to all.

The 2013 NeuroLeadership Summit is going local with three days of events in three different locations. Click here for more information.

I'm having trouble understanding the prison riddle. Is the solution that he has to untwine the rope? If this is the solution, it seemed so obvious that I just read it in to the question. Is there any chance that the people who couldn't solve it just thought the same thing and assumed they were being asked about something else, like what tools he used or how he did it in secret?

I think the point is that people generally can only imagine cutting a rope into two by halving its length. Creative thinking might lead one to realise that a rope could feasibly be divided in half lengthwise too, thereby doubling it's length.

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Nice refresh. All known things that you always ignore.
Don't agree with everything here.
This is not the same 1960's world anymore.
If you ask your colleague he is going to take advantage of the situation. Need to be selective. We should also rely on self-assessment/reflection is needed and is very important part of your life.

This practice has been known in Islam since 1400 years ago. Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) used to take a nap in the afternoon and also instructed his followers to do so. It is good to see that science is discovering what our religion told us 1400 years ago.

Hi David: I love number two about using distractions to help in problem solving. I'm in the mental health field and use this technique often with a fair amount of success. Most people consciously try too hard and their focus can get in the way at first. Thanks for the great article.

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